How the Bay Area came to embrace Detroit-style pizza

1of12Detroit-style pizza: Marc Schechter and Danny Stoller are the guys behind Square Pie Guys, their Detroit-style pizza pop-up at Vinyl cafe on Divisadero in S.F.Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova / Special to The Chronicle

2of12Marc Schechter slices pizza. He and Danny Stoller are the guys behind Square Pie Guys, their Detroit-style pizza pop-up at Vinyl cafe on Divisadero in S.F.Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova / Special to The Chronicle

3of12Detroit-style pizza right out of the oven. Marc Schechter and Danny Stoller are the guys behind Square Pie Guys, their Detroit-style pizza pop-up at Vinyl cafe on Divisadero in S.F.Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova / Special to The Chronicle

4of12Patrick Darmody is served the Detroit-style pizza he ordered with his friend Omar Malek. Marc Schechter and Danny Stoller are the guys behind Square Pie Guys, their Detroit-style pizza pop-up at Vinyl cafe on Divisadero in S.F.Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova / Special to The Chronicle 2018

Americans, who can catalog almost as many regional pizza styles as we can “Real Housewives,” will argue over the authenticity of a slice with as much ferocity as we do questions like “Why are they still making ‘Star Wars’ movies?” and “What is really up with Kanye?”

No one who specializes in an “authentic” regional pizza style can resist the impulse to make it their own.

The paradox of pizza authenticity is on display at Square Pie Guys, Marc Schechter and Danny Stoller’s 4-month-old pop-up, whose interpretation of Detroit-style pizza is both heretical and delicious, as well as in the new Detroit-style pizzas at Pizza Squared in the Design District and Leaning Tower in Oakland.

All serve what first appear to be mini Sicilian pies — which aren’t square, by the way, but rectangular — until you lift one up and notice a filigree fence of crisped, brown cheese around the rim. Some dot the top of the pie with sauce instead of spreading it underneath the cheese cap. The most persnickety import brick cheese from the Midwest.

Detroit-style pizza may not be having quite the same moment as culturally appropriative ayurvedic treatments and fuzzy sweaters, but it’s having a moment nonetheless. The story of how Schechter, 30, and Stoller, 29, started Square Pie Guys is far more roundabout than some epiphanic meal in Detroit. Neither has visited the city yet, in fact. They discovered their pizza polestar thanks to two Bay Area companies: Tony’s Pizza Napoletana and Instagram.

Danny Stoller makes Detroit-style pizzas at his Square Pie Guys pop-up at Vinyl cafe on Divisadero in S.F. Rectangular slices and pies, from above, and sauce on top are the signature elements.

Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova / Special to The Chronicle

The origins of Detroit-style pizza — DSP when you’re talking to pizza obsessives — do lie in Detroit, at least. According to an interview that Marie Guerra Easterby gave to Detroit radio station WOMC a few years back, Gus Guerra, her father, learned to make pizza from his Sicilian mother-in-law. In 1946, he introduced the pies to a Detroit bar named Buddy’s Rendezvous, baked in square-edge, blue steel auto-part trays he picked up at a local hardware store. In 1953, Guerra left Buddy’s and opened another pizzeria called Cloverleaf.

Over the next 60-odd years, the two pizzerias expanded into local chains whose inch-thick slices, puffy and dimpled, had two hallmarks: a layer of brick cheese (brick is its official name, and it’s similar to jack) that melted onto the edges of the heavy pans, and tomato sauce spooned on top of the cheese.

Now, no one sets out to invent a regional style of pizza. In fact, people who live in the region are often the last to recognize that this thing they’ve been eating for years is unique to them. (As proof, I submit to you: When was the last time you referred to the pies from Gialina, Chez Panisse Cafe and Pizzahacker as “Bay Area pizza”?)

It took a Detroiter with his eye on international pizza competitions to bring DSP out of regional obscurity. In 2012, Shawn Randazzo, the owner of two Cloverleaf franchises, baked a square pie with chicken, bacon, sauteed garlic, onions and barbecue sauce (an “Iron Chef”-esque twist) at the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas. The pie made Randazzo the World Champion Pizza Maker of the Year and the envy of his pizza peers.

One of these peers was Tony Gemignani, founder of Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in North Beach. That same year, Gemignani says, he and a few students in one of his classes at the International School of Pizza mulled over this revolutionary Detroit style. Several members of that class subsequently opened DSP shops in Colorado and Texas. Gemignani, too, traveled back to Detroit to do a little reconnaissance and secure a supply of steel pans. He introduced his own version at Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, his North Beach flagship, around 2013, and included a recipe in his 2014 book “The Pizza Bible.”

“I think it’s comfort food. It has a lot of flavor,” Gemignani says of the style. “The sauce on top of this pizza — you even see #sauceontop hashtags — makes your pizza pop more.”

Detroit-style pizza at Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in North Beach.

Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle 2017

Here is where I confess that I enjoyed the Tony’s Detroit pizza so much that I made a Buddy’s detour during a trip to Michigan a few years back. By comparison, Gemignani’s version came across as a stadium-rock interpretation of the original: note-perfect yet amplified. Some of the differences were due to the way Gemignani’s cooks leaven the dough and add cheddar to the brick cheese on the crust.

I am not the kind of guy who shares his pizza tourism pics on Instagram, let alone uses #sauceontop. That would be Marc Schechter, a Long Island, N.Y.-born software salesman and stand-up comedian who broadcasts his love for pizza via his Instagram feed, @pizzaman_420.

Schechter’s been posting photos of his home-baked pies for years now and direct-messaging with pizza stars to ask questions, finding them more approachable than he ever expected. Not long after moving to the Bay Area from Seattle, Schechter interned and then worked in his off-hours at restaurants like Pizzahacker and Pizzeria Delfina in Burlingame. (“It was really a trial by fire,” he says of Saturday shifts at the latter. “I have the burns from the pizza oven to prove it.”)

In his other spare time, he practiced baking DSP at home, with an eye on taking it pro. Schechter says he didn’t want to open yet another shop selling crisp-crusted, naturally leavened, seasonally responsive Bay Area pizzas. “I love the flavor profile: This fluffy dough, the crispy bottom, the cheese (that) pushes out to the edge,” Schechter says. “In your one bite of Detroit-style you get the texture experience of a whole pie.”

In March 2018, after Pizzahacker owner Jeff Krupman dropped his long-running pizza pop-up nights at Vinyl, a wine bar on Divisadero, Schechter took over the deck ovens to bake New York and Neapolitan pizzas. Five months in, he roped in Danny Stoller, who had cooked for decades under Seattle’s best-known chefs and now works here for a culinary innovation company.

They bought blue-steel pans from pizza champion Randazzo, who now has a second career supplying aspirational DSP makers like them. On Thursday and Friday nights, the Square Pie Guys now put out pies like the PeppeRoni-Burgundy and a Mean Green Sausage Machine with ricotta sauce, roasted broccolini and honey. Beyond their crackling rim and airy crumb, the pies don’t quite taste like Buddy’s or Tony’s DSP. They aren’t spotted with #sauceontop. They don’t use brick cheese. If we’re speaking frankly, Square Pie Guys’ pizzas taste as if serious cooks brought the Pizza Hut pan pizza up to San Francisco standards. This is, in every way, a compliment.

“Regional styles are important only so much as they erect a framework for what it is,” Stoller says. “Beyond that it’s a playground. It’s an open space.”

Owner Isaac Lim prepares to cut a pair of Detroit-style pizzas at Leaning Tower in Oakland.

Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Which is the crux of the paradox of pizza authenticity. We may have moved beyond the 2000s, when restaurants posted “True Neapolitan Pizza” certifications on their front windows, but to me the proclamation of regional pizza styles feels like an unnecessary repackaging of America’s favorite food as a cultural experience. The most absurd example of this is the Seattle restaurateur who has tried over the course of two restaurants to make the case that Minnesota pizza exists. Like other former Minnesotans, I have two one-word responses: “No” and “Why?”

So why, in fact, are we eating Detroit-style pizza? (Because of that crisp cheese crust.) Will it be true Detroit-style pizza? (No.) Will we argue over its authenticity anyway? (Ahem.)

Schechter and Stoller are looking at spaces in the East Bay, hoping to keep their San Francisco pop-up humming while opening a restaurant that trains workers the Bay Area tech economy has marginalized. Pizza, the two cooks think, can do that. It’s kind of a magical food, really: a communal meal, a comfort food, one equally enjoyed by people who obsess over the details and people who have never heard of the World Pizza Championships.

“I can’t think of too many people who just don’t love pizza,” Schechter says.

A guide to Detroit-style pizza in the Bay Area

Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, 1570 Stockton St., San Francisco; 415-835-9888, www.tonyspizzanapoletana.com. Rich and generously sauced, with a high crown of crackling cheese, Tony Gemignani’s DSP ($28-$38 for a large rectangle) tastes the most like the original.

Jonathan Kauffman has been writing about food for The Chronicle since the spring of 2014. He focuses on the intersection of food and culture — whether that be profiling chefs, tracking new trends in nonwestern cuisines, or examining the impact of technology on the way we eat.

After cooking for a number of years in Minnesota and San Francisco, Kauffman left the kitchen to become a journalist. He reviewed restaurants for 11 years in the Bay Area and Seattle (East Bay Express, Seattle Weekly, SF Weekly) before abandoning criticism in order to tell the stories behind the food. His first book, “Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat,” was published in 2018.